One evening in the summer of ‘76, Masao was on his way home from his cabbage fields. He was passing his neighbor Hiroshi’s house, half a kilometer away from his own, when the door sprang open and old Hiroshi stormed at him, waving sheets of paper. “Guess what this is?” He beamed.

“What?”

“I sold half my lands.” He rifled through the papers and showed Masao the contract, an exorbitant sum underneath.

“No way! Are you being blackmailed?”

Hiroshi laughed. “Don’t tell me you haven’t gotten any offers.” He shook the contract at Masaos face. “This one’s the third. I already rejected two last month! Almost scary, no?”

The following weeks, like Hiroshi had said, offers came. Even though the offered sums were quite formidable, Masao rejected them. For Masao Endo and his younger brother Kunimoto, cultivating their lands was as natural as the sun rising and setting. Even those years when the crops were bad, the idea of selling his fields and doing something else had never crossed his mind.

Over time, more letters arrived, offering bigger sums. And Masao rejected them. Old Hiroshi moved away without so much as saying goodbye. A construction site grew where his fields had been, and soon the skeleton of a four story apartment building cast its shadow onto Masaos fields. A train station here, another one there. Tracks inbetween. The number of cars per hour on the patchy asphalt in front of his house doubled and then tripled.

“Tokyo’s growing”, Masaos wife Ayako said, looking at a passing train, wiping sweat from her forehead. “Soon we’ll be surrounded by shopping centers and parking garages.”

“Then we’ll grow cabbage in the middle of shopping centers and garages.” Masao planted another seed into the ground. He had never wanted to do anything but farming. The soil he and his brother had inherited wasn’t great, but it was theirs. Their father had been a farmer, and so had his father before him. Age comes fast, when you spend your days out in the fields. A bead of sweat dripped from his forehead to the earth and left a tiny dark spot where it landed. Like watering the soil with his very own body, he thought. Pouring his life into these fields. One day, he’d die here, he was sure of that.

Two days later, his brother Kunimoto rang his doorbell. Masao opened and Kunimoto greeted him with a stack of files under his arm. Masao took one look at the paper and slammed the door shut.

“Hey,” Kunimoto yelled from outside. “That’s no way to treat your brother.” He knocked at the door.

“No,” Masao shouted through the thin wood. “The answer is no.”

“You haven’t heard the question.”

“I know what you’re up to. I’m not gonna see the fields I grew up on make way for another one of these malls or whatever.”

“Masao, let me in.” Kunimoto pounded his fist against the door several times. “You need to see this.” He kept on thumping the door. A vase on the wall-fitted shelf jumped half a centimeter each time Kunimotos hand made contact. It hopped closer and closer towards the edge. Masao unlocked the door.

“Wise decision, brother.”

…

Kunimoto knelt in front of the living room table and spread documents all over it. He had consulted an investment firm in Tokyo about the value growth not only of his own land, but that of Masao as well.

“That fool Hiroshi,” Kunimoto said, “sold his real estate a year ago. Now its worth is already six-point-three percent up! Scammed him, whoever bought his fields. I’d go and laugh at his face, if I knew where to old fool went.”

Masao leaned back, his arms crossed. “What is your point?”

“Look at this.” Kunimoto snatched a document and held it for Masao to see. “We’re sitting on a gold mine. Whoever owns this land in ten or twenty years will be like royalty. The smartest move is to rent it out.”

Footsteps on the stairs. The door slid open and Ayako entered. She gave Kunimoto a greeting.

“Look Ayako,” Kunimoto said, waving the paper at her, “look at this and tell me we’re not fools if we keep on digging through the dirt. Open your husbands eyes.”

Ayako took the paper, eyed it over, then went to the next. Then the next. Masao started wiggling his foot. His wife took her time looking through the heaps of paper. Like she had a business sense, Masao thought and rolled his eyes. Some time passed. Finally, Ayako turned towards the two brothers.

“Those last five or so years, things have already changed,” she said. “Look out of the window, Masao. There’s a train station now, five minutes by foot. A supermarket fifteen minutes.”

Masao shook his head. Yes, Matsune-Station. That damned train station no one had asked for. It stood right where the big old pine tree once stood. Where he had played as a child, and where he had said goodbye to Ayako after their first date, almost ten years ago. She had kissed him on the cheek before she turned to walk home. He’d stood there for fifteen more minutes, watching her walk between the fields towards her own home until she was out of sight. She hadn’t looked back once. Ayako sure knew how to put a boy on the rack. But now that oh so convenient train station had taken the pine tree’s place on the side of the road, and Ayako seemed happy for it. He shook his head again. He didn’t want to bring this sob story up in front of his brother.

But Ayako seemed to have read his mind. “Even the pine tree is gone. Maybe it’s time for us to leave as well? And besides…” She touched her belly.

Masao had never given much thought to becoming a father. He had always assumed the day would come eventually, and he’d had a vague idea about a son as his successor. Because that’s how things went. Ayako however, said she wanted something “better” for her son than to be a farmer.

“Better?” Masao stared at her with an open mouth. “You say that like we are rabble.”

Ayako looked down at her hands, slowly rubbing her palms together. Her family had lived in the area for generations, just like Masaos. How could she betray her lineage? But he knew that she and Kunimoto were right. It wasn’t about being something “better” than a farmer. It was not even a matter of choice. There would be no more farms around here in a couple of years, because the urban sprawl was eating them all up. So in the end, he agreed. Together with his brother he made several appointments at that consulting company in Tokyo and arranged the lease of his lands. During the long meetings, Masao kept mostly quiet and let Kunimoto do the talking. He didn’t understand most of the business talk, and he wasn’t interested in educating himself either. Sometimes he found his thoughts wandering, and when someone suddenly adressed him to ask if this and that was alright with him, he looked at Kunimoto and nodded it off. If Kunimoto thought it was right, then it probably was. And if Kunimoto was wrong, then Masao wouldn’t be able to correct him anyways.

Masao and Ayako Endo moved that same year. They picked an apartment near Matsune-Station, in one of the modern flats that had been erected recently. The new apartment was air conditioned, certainly an improvement over the barely heat insulated farmhouse that his parents had built in the early 50s.

He attended the razing of his old home like someone would attend a funeral. The tiny crack in the kitchen wall, where he had once seen a cockroach disappear as a child. Was the cockroach home behind that wall, he had asked his mother. The stairs that would creak on the third and fifth step (when he had snuck outside at night as a child, he had to make sure not to tread on them). The room where his father had died an early death, and his mother had followed him the year after. Everything was gone now, turned to memories.

Instead, there was Kazuo. Ayako was in labor for 12 hours before Kazuo finally decided to leave his mothers belly. Thanks to Kunimoto, Masao had few duties besides signing papers and being present on occasions, bowing and greeting and drinking with important people, business partners.

Money started rolling in all by itself. Kunimoto managed it all.

Thinking back, Masao couldn’t remember him and his wife ever talking a lot. But it hadn’t been as apparent when they had their farm to care for. There was always something to do, and they had been a good team. They had coordinated their efforts without many words, and it had seemed to Masao at the time that this meant they had some sort of bond or connection. Now their daily routine had been broken up. He could have spend more time with his wife and son. But he didn’t. He took long walks. He watched TV. He sat in a chair. Some nights he would go to a bar and drink.